Something Different

This morning I ran across an article by Dr. Bart Ehrman called Inside the Conversion Tactics of the Early Christian Church.” I’m not sure what his point was, or reason for writing, but because Dr. Ehrman is such a popular figure in some circles, and this article is so easy to pick apart, I thought I’d give it a go.

Introduction

The first thing to note, though not central to his thesis, is that he started out by saying that Christianity began with 11 lower-class, “uneducated day laborers from a remote corner of the Roman Empire” and a “handful of women.” While it is true that the results of the death and resurrection of Jesus began with a few people, there were also another 500 people who saw Jesus alive after the resurrection that anyone could go chat with afterward (1 Cor 15:6).

Also, I found it interesting that while he said it started with a bunch of out-back hicks and hayseeds (though it might be argued that the Apostle John had some pretty high class connections), Christianity triumphed over all the pagan religions of Rome and transformed the world, religiously, socially, politically, and culturally. Christianity has changed everything, and the world would not be the same had it not been here. Interesting.

The Christian Church Created a Need

Dr Erhman said, the gods of the pagan religions were active in the day to day lives of the worshippers, but until Christianity came along, there was no sense that anything eternal was involved in their worship or the lack thereof. Christianity presented the idea of eternal Hell as well as the solution to that problem.

What a great idea. They created the need and then offered the key to solving the problem they had just presented. “Christians created a need for salvation that no one knew they had. They then argued that they alone could meet the need.”

But wait a minute. Is this right? I did a very short search of the web and found that every major and most minor religions in history describe some kind of afterlife where people are rewarded for doing well and cursed (of some kind) for doing evil in this life. You can check it out here, here, and here.

They might not have called where the people went after death, Heaven and Hell, but whether it is Hades or Nirvana or whatever, there isn’t a religion out there that does not, and more importantly, didn’t believe in something happening to us after death. And in every case, there was a very real possibility in every other religious system that the end result of a less than satisfactory life would be really bad.

So, Christians didn’t invent Hell or Heaven. They assumed it and Jesus brought good news that whatever your system, his death would appease the true God and bring light and life to anyone who gave their life to him alone.

It ‘Proved” Its Superiority

In this section, Dr Erhman said that the Christians claimed that not only was their God more powerful than anyone else’s god, their gods were not gods at all. To illustrate his point, he referred to an apocryphal story about the Apostle John praying that God would strike down the idol, Artemis and kill her chief priest, which God did. This point is true. The biblical characters taught that God was God and there were no other gods. And because of that fact, he had to be more powerful than any other god. I’m just wondering why Dr. Erhman chose to use an apocryphal story to illustrate his point, when there are plenty of them in the Bible.

As a result of these celestial contests, people came to faith in Jesus. But then Dr. Erhman made his main point here that people didn’t generally come to faith “en masse, but one person at a time. While God did enjoin the prophets and priests of all the false religions around Israel to prove not only that he was most powerful, but also that those gods did not actually exist, what is not true, all by itself is that people didn’t come to Christ in large groups. 

From the Old Testament there is a story where the god Baal is in a strong contest with the God of the Old Testament. It is found in 1 Kings 18. Elijah told Ahab to call “all Israel” and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah to come to Mount Carmel for a grand showdown.

When the smoke cleared, all Israel believed in God as being the true God. One by one? I don’t think so. And yes, it was a definite show of power. And yes, the gods the priests were worshipping were no gods at all.

In the New Testament, in Acts 2, Peter preached to folks who had traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Pentecost holiday. That day, as a result of his preaching, 3,000 people believed the Gospel and were added to the church. A few weeks later, in Acts 4, it says that “as many as heard the word believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand (4:4). Also, in Acts 5, it says that “believers were increasingly added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women.” It seems to me that most of the stories in the bible are of pretty large numbers of people coming to Christ. One at a time? Sure, probably that too, but not only one at a time.

I’m not sure what Dr. Ehrman’s point here is. If an understanding of God is superior to other folks understanding, or better, if theirs false and yours is right, it doesn’t seem very loving to let those folks believe false things. This is especially true if their end is eternal death. Either way, it is not true that the Christian church started out “not en masse, but one person at a time.”

They Worked From the Ground Up

In this section Dr. Ehrman’s point is that Christianity didn’t grow by going after the rich and famous, rather the followers of Christ went after regular people. I would say that this is sort of true. When we read the book of Acts, for example, we see Christianity spreading, first to the folks from all over the Roman Empire who were visiting Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost. These may or may not have been religious leaders, but they probably were wealthy enough to take time off work to travel to Jerusalem for two weeks. They were also savvy enough about scripture to know that they were expecting the Messiah, though that might have simply been in the air because of the Roman occupation. Because Christianity was the fulfillment of the Jewish Law, all the apostles were Jewish, and Jesus was Jewish, the church began by going after Jews first. Then, after Paul was saved, he was called to go to the Gentiles (non-Jews) and the church went worldwide after that. However, the first Gentile converts were preached to under the ministry of Peter. You can read about this in Acts, chapter 10.

On the other hand, one of Paul’s goals was to go to Rome and preach to Caesar. In one of his skirmishes with the Jews, Paul appealed to Caesar to settle the fracas. Now whether he would have seen Caesar for that infraction or not, I don’t know. But in the following chapters it appears that the Roman leaders thought they were sending him to appear before Caesar himself. And Paul mentions the household of Caesar in the book of Philippians (4:22). Also, it appears from things he said in other places, Paul was certain he was going to get to talk directly to Caesar himself.

So, yes Christianity went after regular people, but the Apostles and converts pretty much went after anyone who would listen.

It Cannibalized the Competition

Interesting title. Dr. Ehrman said, “Christianity succeeded in large measure because it required potential converts to make a decision that was exclusive and final.” He added that other religions, especially Roman and Greek religions didn’t require that you give up your previous religion when you added their pantheon to yours. This is true. But Christians believed that their God was the only true God and to worship any other God was anathema to them. 

God said, “You may not worship any gods except me, You may not worship me like the people in the other nations worship their gods, I am the only God, you must worship me like I tell you to worship me” (Ex 20:2-6; Deut 12:3-31; Etc.). If God is truly God, as evidenced by all the miracles, then all these commands make perfect sense. If God is God and nothing else is, then we have an obligation to worship and serve him.

So, yes. Since the Christian God was the true God, it makes no sense to worship all the pagan gods, including Caesar and his house gods. So, everywhere Christianity has gone (except maybe the Roman Catholic version) all the false gods are done away with. And this is a good thing.

It Found a Powerful Sponsor

This small section of the article appears to contradict a previous one. In the earlier one it says that Christians went after grass roots people and not after the leaders. In this section, Dr. Erhman said, “throughout its first three centuries it recognized fully the importance of converting influential supporters.” I don’t disagree at all with this section, except that I don’t think there is any evidence that this was something planned. It was, however, often how things worked out. In the book of Acts, we see evangelism happening with everyone. Everyone was talking about Jesus and his resurrection. It wasn’t relegated to women at wells, or heads of households, or pollical leaders.

This was an interesting article. I don’t know where Dr. Erhman was going to go with this. There wasn’t any application or assertions. He didn’t say whether he agreed with anything he had written or whether there was anything we are supposed to do with any of the information.

On the other hand, there was enough wrong with it that I wonder about the scholarship and where that scholarship might take a person. I have a book by Dr. Erhman on my shelf but haven’t gotten to it yet. I’ve heard he used to be an evangelical Christian, but now writes against Christianity. This article wasn’t so much against Christianity as it might be groundwork for an attack later. Which is why I thought it was important to interact with it.

Photo by adrianna geo on Unsplash